The only thing that troubled the gardener was to watch the decadence of his beloved Cathedral.  The revenues of the archbishop and of the Chapter had been greatly wasted during the war.  What had occurred was what happens after a great flood, when the waters begin to subside and carry everything away with them, leaving the land bare and uninhabited.  The Primacy lost many of its rights, the tenants made themselves masters, taking advantage of the disorders of the State; the towns refused to pay their feudal services, as though the necessity of defending themselves and helping in the war had freed them for ever from vassalage; further, the turbulent Cortes had decreed the abolition of all lordships, and had very much curtailed the enormous revenues of the Cathedral, acquired in the centuries when the archbishops of Toledo put on their casques, and went out to fight the Moors with double-handed swords.

Even so, a considerable fortune remained to the church of the Primacy, and it maintained its splendour as if nothing had happened, but the Senor Esteban scented danger from the depths of his garden, hearing from the canons of the Liberal conspiracies, the executions by shooting and hanging, and the exiling, to which the king Senor Don Fernando appealed, in order to repress the audacity of the “Negros,” the enemies of the Monarchy and of religion.

“They have tasted the sweets,” said he, “and they will return—­see if they do not return, and take what is left!  During the war they took the first bite, taking from the Cathedral more than half that was hers, and now they will come and take the rest; they will try and catch hold of the handle of the fryingpan.”

The gardener was angry at the possibility of such a thing happening.  Ay! and was it for this that so many lord archbishops of Toledo fought against the Moors?  Conquering towns, assaulting castles and annexing pasture lands, which all came to be the property of the Cathedral, contributing to the great splendour of God’s worship!  And was everything to fall into the dirty hands of the enemies of anything that was holy?  Everything that so many faithful souls had willed to them on their deathbeds, queens and magnates, and simple country gentlemen, who left the best part of their fortunes to the Holy Metropolitan Church, in the hope of saving their souls!  What would happen to the six hundred souls, big and little, clerics and seculars, dignitaries and simple servants who lived from the revenues of the Cathedral?....  And was this called liberty?  To rob what did not belong to them, leaving in poverty innumerable families who were now supported by the “great pot” of the Chapter?

When the sad forebodings of the gardener began to be realised, and Mendizabal decreed the dismemberment, the Senor Esteban thought he would have died of rage.  But the Cardinal Inguanzo did better.  Placed in his seat by the Liberals as his predecessor had been by the Absolutists, he thought it best to die in order to take no part in these attempts against the sacred revenues of the Church.